28th Sunday, 1997

Thanksgiving

I have a really wonderful collection of readings for today. And as is often the case, it is somewhat daunting to try to join them. However, it is even more so because this is one of the few semi-sacred holidays in the civil year, namely, Thanksgiving. So, I would like to try a tour de force to talk about Thanksgiving and join these readings also.

Let us begin with the Gospel and these ominous warnings about wealth in this famous passage - - warnings which are replicated throughout the New Testament. When you think about the social and cultural situation in which these words were spoken, words we can assume that were the faithful representation of Jesus' sentiment, they are even more astonishing, because most of the people in his world lived at the subsistence level. So, the question of wealth was a very different question for them than it is for us. However, there is one thing that is constant about the danger of acquisition, and this emerges from the question of "Who is wealthy?", or to put it another way, "When is enough enough?".

But knowing Jesus through the New Testament you understand that he is not demonizing people with a lot of material possessions. Therefore, what is in play here must be something that is constant through all human beings. Apparently in rich people it simply emerges with a clarity that is not there in the lives of those of us who think we are not wealthy. And this opens up an enormous range of possibilities: what is there about being wealthy, or having many material possessions, that makes us impervious to God? This is the issue.

As I said previously, I think that this question opens a rich vein that can be mined with all sorts of benefits - - there are all kinds of things in there once you start thinking about it. However, this is a finite world today and I am not going to talk forever. So, I would just like to make two suggestions as to what does seem characteristic of the truly wealthy, or the rest of us, the wealthy wannabees.

There are two fundamental attitudes that are present, not just in the wealthy, but which the acquisition of many material possessions aggravates. One of them is the sense of deprivation in the face of life. For example, I do not know very many millionaires, but the couple I do know, and I do not know them well, or really personally, seem driven by the sense of an impoverished childhood and they attempt to overcome this in all kinds of ways with the most aggressive and continuous effort. They continuously say, "I am not going to be poor anymore!" This seems to be the motor for a large amount of acquisitiveness. However, I find this even among the poor. For example, I know all kinds of poor people who are big collectors. This collecting may be fairly mild in comparison: salt and pepper shakers, memorial spoons, cookie jars. What is going on there? It is a fascinating phenomenon, and I cannot help but think that part of this behaviour is a kind of compensation for a sense that life has somehow cheated me. And I do not mean "cheated me" in terms of material objects - - but "cheated me" in terms of human opportunites, affection, recognition - - all kinds of things! And if it is the case that that sort of impulse drives many people, giving them almost preternatural energy to spend, for example, one-hundred-and- twenty hours per week making money, then I can recognize an affinity with those people. It is not just the rich people that Jesus is trying to help here by plointing out the sense of deprivation.

The second attitude is the sense of entitlement. I think it comes from quite a different source than the sense of deprivation. Perhaps I am getting more jaundiced than I think I am, but living with university students I am astonished every year at the insouciance they seem to have, for example, about the work they make for other people around this institution. Many people account for this situation by saying that "all adolescents are slobs". Well, perhaps. But I think there is more to it than that. There is this sense that "the world is my playpen". I have chosen this metaphor intentionally. The student says, "I deserve to be here, I have an entitlement to all of these things and, therefore, I can use them with abandon and maybe create problems in the doing of it - - but I am entitled to create problems too". I remember vividly, and this was years ago, when I was a residential don at New College in the University of Toronto, being regularly astonished that the kids would come home drunk on the weekend and vomit all over the carpets and the walls and say, "Oh, the janitors will take care of it". This is one of the more disgusting incidences of this "sense of entitlement" It is a sense of entitlement that is accompanied by statements such as, "This belongs to me", and "I deserve this". This is an uncanny thing that students here, at King's College, and in most university environments for that matter, believe.

In both of these instances, that of the sense of deprivation and of the sense of entitlement, there is something that innures us against any assault that God may want to make on our lives and on the hardness of our hearts. In being driven either by a sense of deprivation or by the sense of entitlement, there is no room for gratitude. Because what I have is my own, either by dint of my hard labour, or simply because of the nature of things. I cannot be grateful for the things that I think I have earned. It is impossible! I cannot be struck or grateful for the things I think that I deserve. That is impossible! And I cannot help but think that this is at least partly what underlies these menacing texts about how difficult it is for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God, because the beginning of the entry into the kingdom of God is precisely a sense of gratitude to God. And it is not a matter of walking from here to there, it is a change of one's heart. If one cannot be grateful, not just for this or for that, but for everything, we are impervious - - we really are impervious.

So I think this is wisdom about which Geordie read so eloquently. What is wisdom? We intellectuals who are involved in academia think we know all about wisdom. Wisdom is about my having more footnotes than you. Is it? We have cerebrated wisdom. Wisdom, I would propose to you, is first of all a matter of the heart. We have isolated the mind, in the Cartesian way, from the rest of human life, much to our loss. Instead we are unitary beings. The head basically operates from the heart, and not the heart in the kind of nineteenth century Romantic sense, but in the Jewish sense of "everything that I am". Not "I think, therefore, I am", but rather "I think as I am". So wisdom has very much to do with gratitude. Then of course all this business about the word of God as a double-edged sword plays into that fairly obviously.

Where does this all leave us? Where does this bring us? There is something that I read in the Liturgy. It is one of the prefaces for mass. I have used it many times and I like it, but I think that only over the past couple of weeks, as I have pondered over these texts, has it occurred to me that to be grateful is itself a gift of God. Take, for example, this text from Mark - - how is this possible? How is it possible to be grateful? Then you take Jesus' statement: "For mortals it is impossible"; it is impossible for us mortals to make "will acts" to be grateful! We cannot do a kind of auto-surgery on our hearts. We cannot transform our own hearts by dint of our own efforts! If you do not believe it, try it. The transformation of our hearts is itself a gift of God. The grace to be grateful. "Grace" derives from the Latin word for "gift". So God makes us gifted individuals at the deepest level, enabling us to receive ourselves and the world and everything else as gifts. And only God can do it. I just think this makes all kinds of sense of the state of the media, the state of the culture, the state of the world, the state of human life, the state of my own heart, the state of my relationships - - everything.

Then finally, what is the payoff? What is the bottom line for all this? Finally, we have Peter, the big mouth, who says, "Look, we have left everything", and lastly, "Now what is in it for us?". Every scholar that I know has said that the answer to Peter's question comes to this: the great bonus of this transformed life, this following of Christ, is the ability to receive everybody else. The hundredfold in this world is our ability to live gratefully with and for each other, not in some kind of transitory Hallmark card way where we get some kind of uplift a couple of times a year. It is the constant state of our being. That is what gratitude does to us. It brings us together with ourselves, with each other, and with God. And that is why, again, gratitude just seems to me to lie at the absolute bottom of this whole enterprise. Happy Thanksgiving.

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RT 19/10/97